Why Freelancing is Now a Poor Man’s Job

With many outlets slashing pay scales, the well-written story is in danger of becoming scarce. The hustle is just beginning for new and seasoned freelancers.

By James Rainey

The list of freelance writing gigs on Craigslist goes on and on.

Trails.com will pay $15 for articles about the outdoors. Livestrong.com wants 500-word pieces on health for $30, or less. In this mix, the 16 cents a word offered by Green Business Quarterly ends up sounding almost bounteous, amounting to more than $100 per submission.

Other publishers pitch the grand opportunities they provide to “extend your personal brand” or to “showcase your work, influence others.” That means working for nothing, just like the sailing magazine that offers its next editor-writer not a single doubloon but, instead, the opportunity to “participate in regattas all over the country.”

What’s sailing away, a decade into the 21st century, is the common conception that writing is a profession — or at least a skilled craft that should come not only with psychic rewards but with something resembling a living wage.

Freelance writing fees — beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and magazines — have been spiraling downward for a couple of years and reached what appears to be bottom in 2009.

The trend has gotten scant attention outside the trade. Maybe that’s because we live in a culture that holds journalists in low esteem. Or it could be because so much focus has been put on the massive cutbacks in full-time journalism jobs. An estimated 31,000 writers, editors and others have been jettisoned by newspapers in just the last two years.

Today’s reality is that much of freelancing has become all too free. Seasoned professionals have seen their income drop by 50% or more as publishers fill the Web’s seemingly limitless news hole, drawing on the ever-expanding rank of under-employed writers.

We remember the days when the low end of the freelance rate scale was .50/word. Now that’s the higher end. SMH

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